I gather that substantially all of the videocassettes of "Revolution OS"
that people have been waving about, lately, must be derived from three
showings in March 2002 on the Sundance cable channel. People taped or
otherwise captured that broadcast, and so here we are. Meanwhile,
filmmaker JTS Moore (CC'd) — who, to remind everyone, ran up
personal consumer debt funding this film out of his own pocket —
is struggling to book theatrical showings that might actually recoup
some of his money, not to mention funding (legitimate) release and
distribution on VCR and/or DVD.

But rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd address this bit about
Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists",[1] which Peter Belew dragged into
the discussion.

Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is
perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was not to the
Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time)[2], but rather
to the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell
was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew
club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in
early 1976, not 1977.)

The letter caused quite a flap. For one thing, this complaint from the
General Partner of "Micro-Soft" over in Albuquerque wasn't entirely
honest: The software in question had been created on a
taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running an 8080 emulator) at Harvard, and
also there was very strong, reasonable suspicion that Gates, Allen, and
Davidoff had "borrowed" from several other people's BASIC
implementations without their authors' permission.

Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation
for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards,
Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500,
which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to
misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's
4kB interpreter arguably was.

Nobody understood software licensing back then. For one thing,
software had never really been though of as a product before 1975-6.[3]
We had only a rough sense of the hacker ethic to work from — but this
involved authors' work being shared because they wanted it shared.
I was vocal among the Homebrewers who, following the flip side of this
logic, wanted to give Gates (and Micro-Soft) the obscurity he was
demanding. We already had TinyBASIC and other freely-distributable
dialects — which flourished after Gates's nastygram. We didn't
need his $500 boondoggle.

But the hacker ethic was never about ripping off creative types.

If anything, one of the distinguishing traits of the free software
movement since the late 80s is that some of us actually do bother
to take licence agreements seriously. I still think that, if more
Homebrewers and others in the hacking community had more consistently
adopted my viewpoint and said "The hell with Altair BASIC and the horse
it rode in on", we'd have had an open source explosion a decade sooner
than we did, and the 1980s would have been a lot more fun.

--
Cheers, The difference between common sense and paranoia is that common sense
Rick Moen is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal; they are.
rick@linuxmafia.com Paranoia is thinking they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler